Crooked River: A Novel

by Valerie Geary

  The judge shuffled through a stack of papers on the bench in front of him and scratched his cheek. Finally, he cleared his throat and said, “I’m setting bail at five hundred thousand dollars.”

  His gavel came down.

  Zeb flinched.

  Bear closed his eyes.

  I dug my fingernails into my arm and sat frozen, staring straight at him until the courtroom cleared.

  Cameras flashed. Reporters shouted my name. Zeb wrapped his arm around me and guided me through the crush of strangers crowding the courthouse steps. He held his hat in front of my face.

  “Leave the girl alone,” he said. “Go on. Git! You goddamn vultures!”

  “Samantha! Samantha!”

  “What do you think about your father’s arrest?”

  “How do you feel about the bail the judge set?”

  “Samantha!”

  “Has he ever been violent with you or your sister?”

  “Has he ever hit you?”

  “That’s enough.” Zeb pushed their microphones away, but he couldn’t push away their questions.

  “Samantha, do you think he’s guilty?”

  “There’s a rumor going around that you and your sister found the body first. What did she look like? Did you see her face?”

  “Samantha! Samantha! How are you handling all of this?”

  “Will you testify?”

  “What about your sister?”

  “Samantha!”

  “What’s it like knowing your father’s a murderer?”

  I was glad Ollie wasn’t here. She’d wanted to come, had even climbed into the front seat of the truck next to me, but Franny had pulled her out again and said this wasn’t any kind of circus she needed to be a part of and it’d be better if she stayed at the farm and helped make blueberry pies. I was starting to think maybe I should have stayed behind, too.

  The reporters broke apart, moving away from us and squawking someone else’s name.

  “Sheriff Harper! Sheriff Harper!”

  I could breathe again.

  Zeb wanted to keep going, hurry me along as fast as he could back to the truck before the reporters had a chance to come after us again, but I ducked away from him and stopped at the bottom of the stairs, under the shade of a reaching dogwood.

  A tall, broad-shouldered man with a thick head of graying hair stood at the top of the courthouse steps. He held up his hands, silencing the reporters. He had a politician’s smile and a fat gold ring on his pinkie finger.

  “Sam.” Zeb reached for my elbow. “Let’s go.”

  “No. Wait,” I said.

  Deputy Santos must have told Sheriff Harper about the boot print and the tire tracks by now. Certainly he would make some kind of appeal for more information, more tips, or a brief statement about how they were still looking at the evidence, pursuing leads, that they hadn’t stopped searching, wouldn’t stop searching until they knew exactly what had happened to Taylor Bellweather that night and why. I wanted to stay and hear exactly what he had to say.

  Zeb let out a frustrated sigh, but let me be. He fixed his hat on his head and turned his attention to the sheriff.

  “I want to first express my condolences to the Bellweather family, and thank them for their continued cooperation during this investigation. When something as terrible as this happens to a community, to a family, it’s hard to find the right words, any words really.” He choked up here. His jaw trembled, and he blinked hard. And I couldn’t stop myself from thinking that he was putting on a mighty good show.

  “The Deschutes County Sheriff’s Department is committed to doing everything we can to ensure justice for Taylor Bellweather and her family. We’re working day and night on this investigation. We’ve made it our top priority. To that end, we’re still asking anyone who believes they might have information about this case to please come forward.”

  For a second, hope.

  Then a reporter shouted, “Does that mean you’re looking into other suspects?”

  “Not at this time.”

  I took a step back, bumping into the dogwood trunk. Zeb’s hand found my elbow, steadied me.

  Sheriff Harper said, “We are confident we have arrested the man who committed this heinous act.”

  “Do you have enough evidence for a conviction?”

  “I cannot comment on the details of our case at this time.” And then he winked. Or maybe there was just a bit of dust caught in his eye.

  Zeb squeezed my arm. “You sure you want to be hearing all of this?”

  I nodded. To prove them wrong, I needed to hear everything.

  I needed to know every detail.

  My fingers shook, but I managed to press all the right numbers, and after three rings, someone on the other end picked up and said, “Register-Guard, how can I direct your call?”

  Calling the newspaper Taylor Bellweather had worked for seemed the best place to start, especially after the papers reported she was in Terrebonne on assignment. They didn’t say who or what exactly she was here for—her editor was quoted saying, “No comment”—only that she was here for a story. But it felt like something important to me. Something worth following up on.

  I drummed the side of the metal phone booth and stared at the keypad and the buttons I’d just pushed, trying to decide what to say, if I should even say anything at all or just hang up and walk away because maybe this would lead me nowhere except straight into trouble.

  “Hello . . . ?” the woman on the other end said and then again, louder, “Hello?”

  I’d found the number in the phone book easily enough and had borrowed enough change from Zeb’s cup holder to pay for at least an hour, though I didn’t think it would take that long. After the hearing, Zeb said he needed to stop by the hardware store for screws. I was going to wait for him in the parking lot, but then I saw the phone booth reflecting in the side mirror and even though it was just a coincidence, it felt like a little something more, too. Like maybe everything had worked out in a certain order just to bring me to this point, this phone call.

  “Is anyone there? Hello?” The woman was impatient with my silence. “Okay, I’m going to hang up now.”

  There was only one way to do this: hold my breath and dive in.

  I curled my body around the phone and brought the receiver close to my mouth. “Joe Mancetti, please.”

  “And who may I say is calling?” She was shouting now, because I had whispered and she must have thought we had a bad connection.

  I brushed sweat from my eyes. I had to get this right. I had to sound like I did this kind of thing every day, like I was official. I cleared my throat.

  “This is Deputy Maribel Santos,” I said, pitching my voice like hers. “I’m calling about the Bellweather case.”

  On the other end, there was a hesitation, a catch in the secretary’s breath, and then she said, quiet now, no longer shouting, “One moment, please.”

  A click, and then silence. No muffled voices in the background, no keyboards clacking or phones ringing, no cheesy elevator music. Just the sound of my own shallow breathing echoed back through the receiver.

  I wiped my face against my shirtsleeve. The sun was straight above me and scorching. I should be sitting in the shade beside Crooked River, dangling my feet in the water. I should be teaching Ollie how to swim. I should be and should be and should be. Doing anything but this.

  A man’s voice interrupted the silence, “Deputy Santos?”

  “Mr. Mancetti,” I said. “Thanks for taking my call.”

  “Didn’t think I’d hear from you folks again after I spoke with Detective Talbert last week.”

  My fingers curled around the phone cord. Of course someone had already spoken with him. Of course they had. He was probably the first person Detective Talbert called after Taylor Bellweather’s parents. And
he’d probably already said everything he knew, everything important anyway.

  I let the silence stretch too long.

  “Deputy? Did I lose you?”

  “No, I . . . uh . . . I . . .” Get it together, Sam.

  I cleared my throat again and let go of the phone cord I’d twisted too tightly around my fingers. It fell away, swinging in the empty space in front of me.

  “I’m still here,” I said.

  “Well, good. We’ve been having a little trouble with the phones this past week, which reminds me . . .” There was a rustling, his hand covering the receiver, and then a muffled shout, “Amanda! Call the phone company and make an appointment for them to come check the lines. This is getting ridiculous.” Then his voice was loud again, slamming into my ear. “So, Deputy. What can I do for you today?”

  “Um . . . well, Detective Talbert and I were going over his notes again recently and we just had a few more questions for you. Follow-up, that kind of thing.”

  “Right, right. Anything I can do to help. Anything at all. Taylor was an important part of our family, even though she hadn’t been with us for very long. Such promise, that girl.” His voice got softer, like he’d pulled the phone away from his mouth. He blew his nose.

  I said, “I’m sorry for your loss,” and the words tasted like pennies.

  “Thank you.” The phone up close to his mouth again.

  I pressed this morning’s newspaper, folded to the front page, against the side of the booth. Taylor Bellweather stared back at me. Not blinking. Blind, deaf, mute. Dead.

  “When you spoke to the detective the other day,” I said, trying not to choke, trying not to stammer, “you said Taylor was in Terrebonne to interview . . .” I rustled the corners of the newspaper and mumbled, “Let’s see, I wrote it down here somewhere.”

  For a second, I felt bad about making Deputy Santos seem incompetent. Because she wasn’t. She was one of the best. But then I thought of Bear still sitting in jail for a murder he didn’t commit and I didn’t care so much after that.

  “We sent her out there to do a piece on Central Oregon’s most famous recluse,” Joe Mancetti said, and it sounded like he might be smiling, like he thought there was something funny about the whole thing. A small-town celebrity. Like the irony of it had only just struck him.

  “Right. Of course.” I chewed on the inside of my cheek, trying to think of how to ask him for a name without making it obvious that I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “Special assignment,” Joe Mancetti said. “Her first time handling a front-page story.” There was a moment stretched long by heat and silence, then he continued, “I guess she still got on the front page, huh? Just wish it could’ve been for something good. Really . . . anything but this.”

  I made a noncommittal sound and stared at Taylor Bellweather’s picture. I’d looked at it so often in the past few days that even with my eyes closed, I could still describe exactly how she was in the photo. Pixie haircut, arched eyebrows, impish stare, turned-up nose, thin lips, sturdy chin, long neck, young, alive—beautiful because of it. And I didn’t think it was fair. That I could remember so much of her, a stranger, and yet whenever I tried to imagine Mom, a person I loved so much, all I could come up with was a grayed-out smudge.

  “Was that all you needed, Deputy?” Joe Mancetti’s voice drew me back to the present, and what I was supposed to be doing, why I’d made this call in the first place.

  I folded the newspaper and shoved it into my skirt pocket. “Did you talk to her the day she died?”

  It seemed like an innocent-enough question to me, a typical thing to ask in a case like this, but the silence stretched too long and when Joe Mancetti finally answered, his tone was no longer casual and warm; instead, his words were clipped and professional and coated in ice. “Like I told Detective Talbert the other day, she called me around six thirty that night.”

  “And after that?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I didn’t hear from her again.”

  “Did you try calling her?” And even though I tried, I couldn’t keep the edge from my words, the anger that she had been sent out here alone and no one had bothered to check up on her, and that maybe if someone had, she’d still be very much alive.

  “Yes. Of course I did,” Joe Mancetti said. “She had an interview scheduled for seven and she was supposed to call me after, but she didn’t. So I called her motel room. Several times. I even called the manager, had him go and knock on the door. You know, I already went over all of this with the other detective.”

  This was when I should have hung up the phone. I could hear the suspicion in his voice, how he was withdrawing from me, starting to think maybe I wasn’t who I said I was, and yet I kept going because I needed answers. Not just for myself anymore, and not just for Bear, either. But for Taylor Bellweather. For her dad and mom and everyone else who loved her. They deserved to know who. They deserved to know why.

  “What time was that again?” I asked, not trying so hard to sound like Deputy Santos now.

  “What? When did I call? Why does it matter? She was already—”

  “No,” I interrupted. “When was her interview? What day? What time? Where was she meeting him?” And it all came out strung together in one long question.

  Joe Mancetti took a deep breath and then, slowly, “Who is this?”

  I didn’t answer.

  He said, “Tell me who this is. Now.”

  I reached to disconnect the call. My fingers hovered over the lever, but I didn’t push down.

  “I know you’re not Deputy Santos. I know that. Hello? Are you a reporter? You know it’s a felony to impersonate a police officer, right? You know that, don’t you? Hello? Hello. I can hear you breathing.”

  “Who was she writing the story on, Mr. Mancetti? Was it Frank McAlister? Is that who she was going to interview?”

  “Frank who?” And then, “Goddamn it! Son of a— Who the hell do you think you are, calling here and asking questions you have no business asking? I can find out who you are, you know that, right? And when I do, I’m taking your name straight to the police and they’ll throw your ass in jail so fast—”

  I slammed the phone down and took a step back. My hands, my chest, my whole body shook. He hadn’t recognized my father’s name. Which meant Taylor Bellweather hadn’t come to Terrebonne to interview Bear. Which meant the person she had come to interview, the only other person I knew of who lived in Terrebonne and fit the description of Central Oregon’s famous recluse, was Billy Roth.

  The phone rang, and I hopped back, startled by its shrill, knowing jangle, by the way it kept ringing and ringing and ringing, as if Joe Mancetti could see me standing here and would wait all day if he had to for me to pick up the goddamn phone. I lifted the phone from its cradle, then slammed it down again. The ringing stopped.

  “Shit,” I said. My heart was beating too fast. My hands were numb.

  The phone rang again. This time I lifted the receiver just enough to end the call, but instead of returning it to the cradle, I let it dangle by its cord, disconnected. If Joe Mancetti tried to call a third time, all he’d get was a busy signal.

  “Sam?” someone called out.

  I turned. Travis was coming toward me from the direction of the Attic, a few blocks down from the hardware store. He had both hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans. His red sneakers scuffed the sidewalk.

  When he got closer, he whistled and said, “Looking fancy. Don’t tell me you dressed up and came all this way just to see me?”

  I blushed and plucked at my skirt, feeling stupid for wearing it, for letting Franny convince me it was a good idea. I gestured toward the hardware store and Zeb’s truck out front. “We were on our way back from Bend, and Zeb stopped to pick up a few things.”

  “Right,” Travis said. “The hearing. How’d it go?”


  “You weren’t there?”

  He shook his head. “Mom went. And she hates closing the store in the middle of the day, so someone had to stay and run the register.”

  I remembered seeing Mrs. Roth standing alone at the back of the courtroom near the doors, remembered how I thought she was looking at me so I waved, but she hadn’t waved back.

  “You didn’t miss anything,” I said. “Trial hasn’t even started yet, but they’ve already made up their minds.”

  He looked over my shoulder into the phone booth, nodded at the receiver still dangling in midair. “Am I interrupting?”

  “No, I was just . . .” I hung up the phone, then walked quickly away from the booth, crossed the street to the hardware store.

  Travis followed me. “Hey, you’re not mad at me about yesterday, are you? At the diner? I really did have to get back to work. It wasn’t just a lame excuse to bolt on you or anything.”

  “Okay.”

  “And I wanted to come over last night,” he continued. “I tried. But Mom had me working on some mailers for Dad’s show and by the time I was done, it was almost midnight.”

  When we reached Zeb’s truck, I leaned against the tailgate and crossed my arms over my chest.

  “So.” Travis stood in front of me, blocking the sun. “You going to tell me what you found or what?”

  “What I found?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “You were going to show me something yesterday. Said it would prove Bear’s innocence.”

  “Oh, right, that.” I shrugged. “It was nothing.”

  Travis tilted his head to one side. “You sure?”

  So maybe my conversation with Joe Mancetti changed everything, and maybe it changed nothing at all. The truth was, I didn’t know much more now than I did before the phone call. Taylor Bellweather had come to Terrebonne to interview Billy Roth. So what? Obviously the sheriff’s department was aware of that when they arrested Bear, and it hadn’t made any bit of difference to them. Over and over Deputy Santos had reminded me that they had to follow wherever the evidence led, and the evidence kept leading them back to Bear.